Allison Mack’s Sex Cult Has Already Inspired Multiple TV Series

Well, we couldn’t toss “sex cult” and “TV actress” around without someone in Hollywood getting ideas. So it is that multiple groups are looking to adapt the NXIVM sex-trafficking group that got Smallville star Allison Mack arrested, both in TV docu-series and fiction.

Deadline first reported that former Psych star and NXIVM member Sarah Edmondson will headline a documentary TV series with her husband Anthony Ames, said to be “set against the ongoing legal drama involving the leaders of NXIVM.” The two will work with cult expert Rick Allan Ross to “reacclimate into society while also helping others (many of whom they had recruited) leave NXIVM and the DOS secret society within it.” It was late March that NXIVM head Keith Raniere was arrested for sex-trafficking and forced labor, while sub-leader Mack was this week arrested and released on a $5 million bond.

Were that not enough, The Hollywood Reporter confirms Annapurna Television has optioned the rights to the New York Times’ 2017 exposé on NXIVM, hoping to “adapt the investigative report as a one-hour fictionalized scripted series that is inspired by actual events.” No writer has yet been chosen and no network is attached, but Westworld star Shannon Woodward will executive produce with Annapurna’s Megan Ellison, Sue Naegle and Susan Goldberg. The series will follow the true-life example of women in an empowering secret sisterhood who “find themselves psychologically enthralled and horrifically sexually enslaved to its leader — and their flesh branded with his initials.”

The saga itself continues to unfurl, so stay tuned for the latest on Mack, Raniere and the NXIVM group.